Owners of flooded homes look for options

By Zack McDonald / The News Herald

Published: Friday, August 16, 2013 at 08:24 AM.

The three backflow preventers will be placed at the Boys and Girls Club pond, at the railroad ditch near Beck Avenue and at the railroad ditch near Westover Drive. About $12,000 will go toward a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system on the stormwater pumping station at the Boys and Girls Club pond.

“The system will automatically dial out to the computer in the utility department if it senses a problem with the pumps, the power coming in or the generator,” Fravel said.

Alert system

As of now the city has an alert system on the pump stations along the pond, but they use an alarm to alert neighbors or passersby who are then relied upon to notify public works.

“This will eliminate some of these problems of not knowing when it went down,” Fravel said. “It will also log all the data from that station so we can see when the pumps were running, when they weren’t, those kind of things.”

Unfortunately, they won’t prevent the cause of the original problem: lightning.

PANAMA CITY — Tearing down the house would be one way to solve the flooding problem, and some residents of Cincinnati Avenue would be all right with that — for the right price.

“If they would come and offer what we owed on the house, I don’t see any problem with that,” said John Dougherty. “Knock it down if you want.”

Panama City commissioners lobbed the idea of purchasing some residences near the Boys and Girls Club pond, which flooded during heavy rains over the Fourth of July holiday. Three city pump stations were knocked out by lightning, further compounding flooding. The topic came about as commissioners unanimously approved a $25,281 budget amendment for three backflow preventers to help with future water issues.

Homes have flooded repeatedly over the years in the area, but the Doughertys were not notified the area was prone to flooding when they purchased their home. The area is designated an “X” flood plain, meaning banks and mortgage providers do not require flood insurance for homebuyers.

Dougherty said Commissioner Mike Nichols, who represents the ward, was throwing around a flat offer of $40,000 per residence.

“None of these houses are that cheap,” Dougherty said. “In our case if we took the $40,000 and said, ‘thank you,’ we’d still owe $40,000.”

Though commissioners doled out the $25,281 for the additional preventers and a computerized alert system to prevent a similar incident from occurring in the near future, it would not solve the problem.

“It used to be a lake,” Commissioner John Kady said of the area. “If we’re in a situation where we are going to fork over $2 million more, trying to make a lake livable, we might be better off buying the lake.”

Kady added: “How do people build on lakes?”

Kady’s concern was the city might be stuck throwing money at the problem or shelling out legal fees each time the area flooded. The city will be defending itself against multiple suits for the Fourth of July incident, according to City Manager Ken Hammons.

Commissioners tried to make it livable about two decades ago by installing the city’s only pumping station by the pond.

“It flooded so many times the city went in and built this pump station,” said Neil Fravel, public works director.

The project cost about $2 million, Fravel said, to pump water 0.3 miles from the pond north of 19th Street south to Lake Huntington.

“But the system only works if it’s operational,” Fravel said of the preventers. “This gives us more warning, but does it mean the system won’t go down again? No.”

The three backflow preventers will be placed at the Boys and Girls Club pond, at the railroad ditch near Beck Avenue and at the railroad ditch near Westover Drive. About $12,000 will go toward a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system on the stormwater pumping station at the Boys and Girls Club pond.

“The system will automatically dial out to the computer in the utility department if it senses a problem with the pumps, the power coming in or the generator,” Fravel said.

Alert system

As of now the city has an alert system on the pump stations along the pond, but they use an alarm to alert neighbors or passersby who are then relied upon to notify public works.

“This will eliminate some of these problems of not knowing when it went down,” Fravel said. “It will also log all the data from that station so we can see when the pumps were running, when they weren’t, those kind of things.”

Unfortunately, they won’t prevent the cause of the original problem: lightning.

“If a lightning strike takes out the equipment over there, we’ll find ourselves in the same situation we were last time,” Fravel said.

Fravel said the only permanent solution is to move the houses.

“Spell that any way you like — whether it’s raising the homes or tearing them down,” Fravel said.

City staff is looking for solutions as the Doughertys are living with problems.

“Even if we try to sell it in the future, we’d have to show it’s been flooded before and that would just make it harder on us,” Dougherty said.

His family is going through the application process to get State Housing Initiative Partnership (SHIP) funds, but a timeline was not released to him. Dougherty said independent contractors came by to assess the damage and bid on the project. A value of the damage was not given, but the bare minimum of repairs would be to replace all carpeting, all ground-level cabinets, appliances, plumbing and the bottom 4 feet of sheetrock throughout the house.

Dougherty hasn’t heard back from the city, but contractors told him the work would take six to eight weeks to perform. His family would have to be out of the home during repairs and SHIP funds cannot be used for lodging in the meantime.

“So it’s kinda like this waiting game,” Dougherty said. “So where we’re at now is waiting for a day for them to start working on the house, but once they start we can’t be in here.”

Rains have continued for more than a month after July 4. Each morning that Dougherty awakens to the sound of rain, a brief moment of anxiety hits him for fear of more flooding, he said.

NOTE: Clicking on hashtags in this stream may result in seeing adult material, such as photos or foul language, that appear elsewhere on Twitter. We do not endorse such material, but we do not have control over what items can be found in hashtag searches.